First House

– Forest Town –

A new house for a computer buff conceptually occupies a small suburban site as a series of elided vertical and horizontal planes: “the backgrounds”: to antique pieces, to paintings, to cooking, sleeping – A classic Mies diagram. The fact and fiction of the design process. The first drawings of the building are very close to the finished work.

In this house the roof is floated on alternating sequences of glass and ribbed polycarbonate – clear squares in the blur – I like to think of this as like taking the top of your head off, letting your thoughts fly out laterally… Then there is a whole correspondence between bodies and buildings to be expounded on…or is it that architecture must be the embodiment of the external life of the mind?

This house is intimately engaged with its landscape, and it falls into my curved, landscape, horizon-inspired family of work. It has clear progenitors in my body of work, yet it is completely rooted in its own particular site and the character of its very particular owners. It is, for example, singularly tentacular.